"Young girls are being gang-raped with bayonets and chunks of wood, their insides ripped apart," in the Congo, and it doesn't even show up on most Americans' political radar. The NYT says: according to the UN, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country. ... brutality toward women [is] "almost normal."

Anytime a country denies its citizens the right to speak for themselves and have control of their own minds and bodies, it pisses me off. The fact that this kind of casual brutality is allowed to go on without severe repercussions from countries that consider themselves the guardians of freedom and human rights enrages me.